How are PCB’s Manufactured and Assembled

After the printed circuit board (PCB) is completed, electronic components must be attached to form a functional printed circuit assembly[5][6], or PCA (sometimes called a “printed circuit boar (pcb assembly) assembly” PCBA). In through-hole construction, component leads are inserted in holes. In surface-mount construction, the components are placed on pads or lands on the outer surfaces of the PCB. In both kinds of construction, component leads are electrically and mechanically fixed to the board with a molten metal solder.

There are a variety of soldering techniques used to attach components to a PCB. High volume production is usually done with machine placement and bulk wave soldering or reflow ovens, but skilled technicians are able to solder very tiny parts (for instance 0201 packages which are 0.02 in. by 0.01 in.)[7] by hand under a microscope, using tweezers and a fine tip soldering iron for small volume prototypes. Some parts are impossible to solder by hand, such as ball grid array (BGA) packages.

Often, through-hole and surface-mount construction must be combined in a single assembly because some required components are available only in surface-mount packages, while others are available only in through-hole packages. Another reason to use both methods is that through-hole mounting can provide needed strength for components likely to endure physical stress, while components that are expected to go untouched will take up less space using surface-mount techniques.

After the board has been populated it may be tested in a variety of ways:
· While the power is off, visual inspection, automated optical inspection. JEDEC guidelines for PCB component placement, soldering, and inspection are commonly used to maintain quality control in this stage of PCB manufacturing.
· While the power is off, analog signature analysis, power-off testing.
· While the power is on, in-circuit test, where physical measurements (i.e. voltage, frequency) can be done.
· While the power is on, functional test, just checking if the PCB does what it had been designed for.

To facilitate these tests, PCBs may be designed with extra pads to make temporary connections. Sometimes these pads must be isolated with resistors. The in-circuit test may also exercise boundary scan test features of some components. In-circuit test systems may also be used to program nonvolatile memory components on the board.

In boundary scan testing, test circuits integrated into various ICs on the board form temporary connections between the PCB traces to test that the ICs are mounted correctly. Boundary scan testing requires that all the ICs to be tested use a standard test configuration procedure, the most common one being the Joint Test Action Group (JTAG) standard.
When boards fail the test, technicians may desolder and replace failed components, a task known as rework.

References
· ^ Ayob M. and Kendall G. (2008) A Survey of Surface Mount Device Placement Machine Optimisation: Machine Classification. European Journal of Operational Research, 186(3), pp 893-914 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2007.03.042)
· ^ Ayob M. and Kendall G. (2005) A Triple Objective Function with a Chebychev Dynamic Pick-and-place Point Specification Approach to Optimise the Surface Mount Placement Machine. European Journal of Operational Research, 164(3), pp 609-626 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2003.09.034)
· ^ Borkes, Tom. “SMTA TechScan Compendium: 0201 Design, Assembly and Process”. Surface Mount Technology Association. http://www.smta.org/files/smta_techscan_0201_overview.pdf. Retrieved 2010-01-11.